Many people are warning about peak oil, the concept that our daily oil production peaked in 2005 and will continue to decline fairly rapidly over the next few decades. If this is true, what happens to a society like ours that is so heavily dependent on cheap oil (liquid fuel) for food production, food distribution, commerce (think imports from China and globalization), military machinery, etc?  One of these voices, James Howard Kunstler, warns suburbia that it will run out of energy very soon. Here he is on the Colbert Report stating his case.

Jim Kunstler’s Forecast 2009

There are two realities “out there” now competing for verification among those who think about national affairs and make things happen. The dominant one (let’s call it the Status Quo) is that our problems of finance and economy will self-correct and allow the project of a “consumer” economy to resume in “growth” mode. This view includes the idea that technology will rescue us from our fossil fuel predicament — through “innovation,” through the discovery of new techno rescue remedy fuels, and via “drill, baby, drill” policy. This view assumes an orderly transition through the current “rough patch” into a vibrant re-energized era of “green” Happy Motoring and resumed Blue Light Special shopping.

The minority reality (let’s call it The Long Emergency) says that it is necessary to make radically new arrangements for daily life and rather soon. It says that a campaign to sustain the unsustainable will amount to a tragic squandering of our dwindling resources. It says that the “consumer” era of economics is over, that suburbia will lose its value, that the automobile will be a diminishing presence in daily life, that the major systems we’ve come to rely on will founder, and that the transition between where we are now and where we are going is apt to be tumultuous. My own view is obviously the one called The Long Emergency.

• To read the rest of his blog, go here >>
• and I highly recommend reading this Interview (snippets below)

“We’re not going to run Walt Disney World, Wal-Mart, and the interstate highway system on any combination of wind, solar, nuclear, bio-diesel, ethanol, or used French-fried potato oil. Or dark matter.

There are huge diminishing returns to technology. You find an oil field and you only succeed in draining it more efficiently.

You know, we pretended we had a service economy, we pretended we had a digital economy, but what we really had was a housing-bubble economy, and what that was all about was building more of an infrastructure for a daily life with no future.

What they’re really asking for is a set of miracle rescue remedies so they can keep on running Wal-Mart and suburbia and the interstates and everything.

We’re going to have to inhabit the landscape differently because whether we like it or not, suburbia is going to fail. We’re probably going to have to return to living in towns, villages, cities that are going to be scaled differently. We’re going to have to organize an agricultural landscape that’s inhabited differently because growing food will require more human attention.

We’re going to have to grow food locally wherever we are in the United States, and the places that can’t do that, like Las Vegas and Tucson, you know, forget about it, they’re going to dry up and blow away.

You got to live locally, you got to offer your fellow human beings something useful and maybe you’ll get something useful in return.”

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